


Five Christmases Seen through the Eye of the Hawk

by BardicRaven



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Doctors & Physicians, Gen, Korean War, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-18
Updated: 2008-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:46:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1632305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BardicRaven/pseuds/BardicRaven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five Christmases seen through the eyes of one Benjamin Franklin 'Hawkeye' Pierce, M.D.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Christmases Seen through the Eye of the Hawk

**Author's Note:**

> ##### Many thanks, as ever, go to my husband and beloved first reader, Mike, for his patience, honesty, and encouragement.
> 
> ##### And to the cast and crew of M*A*S*H, who created a series that still delights 36 years later.
> 
> Written for Stephanie

 

 

**1950** The first Christmas wasn't so bad. Pine tree in the mess tent, complete with thermometers and clamps to decorate the evergreen branches. Big bag of presents to give to the orphan kids who flocked to the M*A*S*H 4077th's celebration, kids who for one day were without a care in the world.

Even being tapped to go out and perform an emergency field surgery wasn't so bad - dangling from the end of a rope outside a helicopter like a demented Santa Claus that had forgotten his sleigh at home, while all around him bullets went zinging past, delivering their deadly cargo. He'd made it to the ground safely and regarded that as the best Christmas present he'd ever received.

He'd saved the soldier he'd been sent to save, and given the soldier's buddies a much needed lift of spirits by his absurd yet miraculous descent and the rescue of their compatriot by a bit of skillfully done surgery, all the more amazing because of the conditions he'd had to work under. Foxholes were normally noted neither for sterility nor serenity, but it hadn't mattered.

After the soldier (and himself) were safely aboard the helicopter sent out from the 4077th to retrieve them, he'd come back and gotten roaring drunk, toasting everything and everyone in sight, simply grateful to be alive. He'd passed out in his bunk (or was it someone else's? He couldn't really recall and overall, it didn't really matter since he'd been too drunk to either notice it or appreciate it, depending.)

He awoke the next afternoon with a raging hangover and very little recollection of what had happened the night before. He made a half-hearted attempt to get up before deciding that really, bed, or in his case lumpish Army cot, wasn't such a bad place to be after all. He fell back against what the Army laughingly called a mattress and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

  
That was the first Christmas.  
  
  


* * *

 **1951** The second Christmas was harder. The peace talks had stalled and the battles raged on with no end in sight. During the aftermath of one of them, he'd had to make a split-second decision in surgery that haunted him still. One of the Chinese wounded had gone crazy, threatening to kill them all. In the shattered moment that he had to think about it, he chose the lives of his comrades over the life of his patient. In all the moments afterwards, he wondered if he'd done the right thing.

Going to Father Mulcahy for absolution did nothing to ease his troubled soul. It wasn't in this case that the odd mix of Christianity and Judaism that he had grown up with had been long since rooted out by the world-weary cynicism of medical school and the horrors of the battlefield. No, it was that in his mind, there was simply no forgiveness for what he had done. It didn't matter that he had killed to save countless lives, including his own. There was simply no excuse for breaking that ultimate commandment of both holy book and healer's code. No exceptions, no circumstances under which it was all right to take human life rather than attempt to preserve it.

He left Father Mulcahy's tent and went for a long walk under the moonlight, unmindful that he had left his coat thrown carelessly over a chair in the Swamp. He welcomed the discomfort, as if it were absolution, letting the bitter cold on his skin echo the frost in his heart. A vain attempt to numb the clamoring of his soul.

  
That was the second Christmas.  
  
  


* * *

 **1952** The third Christmas was harder still. The peace talks were still stalled and it had begun to seem as if the war would never end. The orphans were bombed out of their orphanage as a Christmas present from the North Koreans and came to spend the holidays, such as they were, with the 4077th.

Somehow, they'd managed to find room for them all, both in their tents and in their hearts. Food and shelter and supplies stretched so thin it seemed they must surely snap. But they made it work. And thanks to a war-weary member of the Corps of Engineers, they were able to give the children a new home for the new year.

Hawkeye let himself rejoice in the victory, small though it was against the larger horrors surrounding them all. He'd learned by now to take his victories where he could find them, for they, like so much else in this place, could be just as easily gone the next day. Or the next heartbeat.

  
That was the third Christmas.  
  
  


* * *

 **1953** The fourth Christmas he thought he'd hit bottom. He was home now; it should be over. But it wasn't. Everywhere he looked, there were reminders of what had happened. And what hadn't happened. He wasn't sure which made him angrier - the signs that the war had changed everything or the ones that showed that nothing really significant had changed at all.

He found it hard to fit in. He'd changed so much over there. As he'd said once to a beautiful brunette USO ingénue, he'd seen too much to ever be wide-eyed again. And he remembered just enough of what that was like to regret its loss all the more. He was envious of those who still held that promise in their eyes, the hope and belief that all the world was out there just waiting for them to claim it. Envious and not, because he knew the fate that awaited them, awaited those hopes and dreams. His worldview could no longer encompass optimism and for that too, he felt a certain regret.

He grew impatient with both himself and them, the others, all those who came to him expecting miracles and healings he was sure now had been wrung out of him for good. Wanting desperately for things to be as they had been and yet knowing that they never would be, never could be. He grew impatient with wanting things to be different, for the small-town prejudices and bickering to be seen for the unnecessary garbage that they were. But he knew they wouldn't change just because he wanted them to, nor even because he needed them to. And he knew they'd never see it for themselves. Pessimism had come to him via a field hospital's operating room, a surgical implantation he knew he'd never be able to remove.

  
That was the fourth Christmas.  
  
  


* * *

 **1954** The hardest of all, though he was home. He'd had a year to recover from the horrors he'd seen, the horrors he'd participated in. But in the depths of the night, it didn't matter. With every Christmas carol, he expected to hear the return of gunfire to punctuate the music, the whine of shells passing overhead. In the holiday crowds, he'd see laughing people one moment, a field of enemy soldiers the next. No way to know or to control when the change would happen, only thing to do was to endure it with a grin that others took for holiday cheer, but that he knew was a death grimace stretched tight over an empty skull.

The children were the hardest to bear. Whether it was his sister's newborn son at her breast or the crowds of children who came to see Santa, all he could see were the orphans, the children who'd grown up without any one to care for them or about them. Slinking around in the background of the war, stealing to eat, selling themselves and anything that wasn't nailed down in an ultimately futile effort to keep body and soul together for just one more endless day.

And most of all, he saw the one who'd not been allowed to grow up. The specter who haunted him night and day. Not a vengeful ghost, though it might have been easier to take if it had been, but a merciful ghost. _I know why you did what you did,_ it would say time and again in his dreams, in his waking nightmares. _I know why my mother killed me,_ it would say with a wisdom far beyond its earthly years. _To save you all she smothered me against her own body. And I forgive you._

It would have been so much easier if he'd been hated for his crime, for all his crimes. In his mind, in relentless march across his thoughts came the ones he'd killed, whether directly or indirectly by lack of skill or fortune. Whether or not it was truth, he'd killed them. And in eternal damnation, they forgave him, every one. But in their forgiveness he could find no rest.

  
That was his eternal Christmas.  
  
  


* * *

 


End file.
